Tuesday, 8 April 2014

Review of an October Performance of M. NourbeSe Phillip’s 'Zong!'

Missing The Boat: Zong! Reading[s] & Performance in 2013

Joseph LaBine

After viewing Julian Alystyre’s
video “NourbeSe at Naropa-Wake for Trayvon Martin”[1]
and participating in a group reading at the University of Windsor this October,
I think it is necessary to highlight the differences between conventional, one
person readings of Zong!, by Philip
herself or individual readers, and
collaborative performances, like the two I’ve just mentioned. Something occurs
during the performance of the text—something—that
is phenomenological. It disrupts the usual encounter of reading because the
experience of reading is fundamentally altered when the text is read in a
group. By performing Zong!, I believe readers
move past abjection in the text and transcend the horror of the historical
narrative intertwined with the poetic.

Recently, I have seen several
articles attempting to describe the effect felt at collaborative public readings
of Zong[s], or responding to performances of Zong!—performances both watched and/or engaged in. Of note, are
Susan Holbrook’s “M. NourbeSe Phillip’s unreceoverable subjects,” an essay
which responds to a performance by Phillip only and Janet Neigh’s “Dialogues
with M. NourbeSe Philip,” which describes a group reading. For the singular
reading Holbrook suggests the reader is unable to transcend the horror of the
historical account delivered in the poems—the murders that occurred on the
slaveship “Zong”— the performance does not end with “joy and relief”; the
slaves are drowned, their voices reduced to silence, “the story can never fully
emerge” (Holbrook par. 1). I was inclined to agree until witnessing the
phenomenon of a collective group reading of the work. Neigh describes an
experience similar to mine:

Handing out about
twenty photocopies of Zong!, [NourbeSe] provided the audience with page numbers
and instructed us to read these pages along with her without worrying about
staying in unison. A mesmerizing cacophony ensued, as voices moved under, over,
and around each other. (Neigh par. 1)

So
far, no one (to my knowledge) has conducted a study of these performances and
theorized how they might change meaning within the text. This is my main
concern, because Zong! is a work that
requires multiple reading strategies, multiple interpretations of
voices/languages/words/silences, it seems apt that performance-reading is one
of the methods we consider critically. I am particularly interested in how oral
and aural aspects of the text—the zongs heard and spoken at a reading—change
our interpretation of the poems on the page. I am focussed on a certain
mnemonic function that interrupts syntax and how we read the text internally,
thus changing meaning—reversing our memory of the narrative as we hear and
re-hear the poems verbally. I am not the only person to read the text in this
way, Jasper Appler has argued in “ZONG! a Narrative Told Without Telling” that performance is the life of the text,
“narrative relies on the oral and aural for animation…even in a private reading
the text takes life only once you speak it” (1). This is true. The verbal
phenomenology of Zong! interrupts how
we receive the meaning of the text internally. Phillip’s exclusion of
punctuation and syntactical markers allow the text flexibility to change with
aural interruption; the rhythm and flow of the poem changes like the movement
of waves.

The “mesmerizing cacophony” that Neigh describes
parallels the recording of the uWindsor reading available via this YouTube
link:

By
comparison this recording (and overall experience) makes the single-voice
performance of Philip reading “Zong 5” from “Marcella Durand’s Pennsound Picks”
(available on the Jacket2 website), seem small and pointed rather than offer
the poignancy of the larger reading. The individual voice does allow listeners
to focus more on the words it is speaking, there is a singular intonation or
incantation, but this type of reading limits meaning and the possibility for
multiple meanings by mnemonically reinforcing one way of interpreting Zong!.
I have written elsewhere about Dislocation poetics as a function of diaspora
literature. To put it simply, I believe the horrors of the slave ship are
represented in the text of Zong!;
families were separated, passengers were placed beside other Africans that
spoke different languages, the cargo was divided according to size, shape, and
sex. The fragmentation on the page reflects the dislocation felt by the
enslaved Africans travelling on “Zong.” We, as readers, experience the horror
of the historical narrative and text abjectly—we are beside ourselves when
trying to interpret the fragmented text but our experience mirrors the
dislocation felt by the passengers aboard the ship.

I believe this dislocated horror is
the main significance/problem surrounding reading method and mnemonics in the
text. Neigh’s observation that participants in the Waterloo reading were given
photocopies is also worth considering—disorientation is heightened when readers
work from fragments rather than the whole book with its index and glossary as
reference. The experience of reading aloud becomes almost entirely aural (the
rustling of paper can be heard on the Windsor recording) as participants try
harder and harder to make sense of the fragments they have been given. At the
uWindsor reading, I read from a printout of early publications of “Zong!#25 and
Zong!#26”[2]
from the journal boundary 2. I found
that because I only had a small portion of the first sequence of poems that I
quickly ran out of reading material and had to repeat lines. Towards the end of
our reading I noticed a mnemonic shift in what I was reading. Because of the
lack of punctuation, I picked a rhythm and inserted my own punctuation and
syntactical interpretations. I will say that there is no wrong way to read Zong!
but repetition has a function of entrenching one reading, however, when the
momentum of the rhythm of that repetition is set by a group and the groups
shifts, slows, or speeds up—these phenomena of collaborative reading forces
participants to adopt different mnemonic structures change their inserted
markers, syntax, and ultimately the interpreted meaning of the poems. I noticed
a line-shift in the piece I was reading. At the start of the recording my voice
can be heard reading the lines:

was the cause was the
remedy was the record was the argument was the

delay was the evidence was overboard was the not was
the cause was the

Because
of a shift in rhythm of the group, something that occurred by accident
possibly, something, I omitted a
“was” so that “the cause” became “the remedy,” which became “the record,” but a
new record and one in which my thinking about the narrative had changed.

In my first interpretation, I clung to the events
recounted in the notes on the case of Gregson
v. Gilbert (Philip 210-211). I tried desperately to associate meaning to
words during the dislocated act of reading aloud amongst many other voices.
However, the only meaning I could associate was that of the atrocity itself,
the horror that in the eyes of the captain and crew “the result was justified”
(8). The slaves still had no voice and
the speaker of my zong was the cold emotionless court room reporter. However,
after the omission of the “was” something
spiritual happened; agency shifted, the passengers became the speaker, became
one voice speaking from underneath the water. My interpretation began to move
past the horror and transcend it. The poems now became about giving silenced
voices agency.

There
is such a possibility for multiplicity of meaning and variety of interpretative
methods within Zong!. But, because of
the fragmented nature of the text and underlying historical narrative, readers
like myself will cling to the historical narratives to construct meaning.
Orality, the divergent rhythms of a group reading, mnemonic turns, these are
the keys to shifting agency and giving voice to silence within the poems. Neigh
classifies the group method as part of “Phillip’s ongoing commitment to poetry
as a radical mode of historical inquiry and radical protest” (Neigh par.1).
Every reading becomes either an opportunity to reinforce the horrific
narrative, or to revise memory each time by interrogating what voices might
have said.

[1]“NourbeSe at Naropa-Wake for
Trayvon Martin” is certainly a ‘performance’ rather than a simply a large scale
reading of the text. Alystyre’s video on Vimeo is private, was viewed
privately, and thus I’ve only cited it within the body of this essay. However,
I think it is crucial that video or audio recordings of performances like this
one should be put into the public domain. The participants in the “wake” dressed
in white and held candles throughout the reading, these elements designate
performance and are crucial to forwarding the text as performance art.

[2] Philip, M. NourbeSe. “Zong! #25
and Zong! #26.” boundary 2 33.2
(2006): 8-9. Web. 21 Oct. 2013. The number and positions of these poems in the
book have since been reversed with the journal version of now “Zong! #26”
appearing first on page 43 with the number 25 with the block sequence following
on page 45 with different line breaks.

[3]For the purposes of continuity I
have decided to work through the original journal publications of the two poems
I read at the reading. The pages cited are from boundary 2.